The Bulldog Drummond Megapack

by H. C. McNeile

  “In fact—an impasse, and the Yard authorities were annoyed. They dislike unsolved murders, and here were two in the course of a few days. That there was a connecting link between them and the death of the Italian in Genoa was obvious: that that link was the selling of secret information with regard to the new submarine was likely. But beyond that stood a blank wall, from which there emerged during the next few weeks only one further bit of evidence. It transpired that Giuseppi had been seen during the week before his death in the company of two men both of whom had a key suspended to their watch-chains. This information came from the proprietor of the small restaurant where the draughtsman used to have his lunch, but he could give no description of them that would not have fitted a hundred middle-class Italians.

  “And so for the time the matter rested. The official theory was that Giuseppi had sold information to the Key Club; had been discovered and murdered. That the emissary of the Key Club had in his turn been murdered in order to obtain that information. And that finally the man Johnstone had been done to death too, to prevent him passing on what he knew to the police. But as to whether the same criminal or bunch of criminals were responsible for all three, or what had happened to the tracings there was no means of telling. Certainly no offer was made of them to the British Government as had been the case before with the French high explosive.

  “Six months elapsed before anything more was heard. And then a very remarkable fact came to our knowledge, which though it bore out in part the police theory, also put the activities of the Key Club in a somewhat different light. You may remember that the time before they had given the secret to all countries; this time they had sold it to one. Through devious channels we found that the French had bought for a large sum of money the actual submarine details on which Giuseppi had been working at the time of his death. Abstract idealism had been replaced by concrete realism.”

  “There was damned little idealism about my bloke this afternoon,” said Drummond with a grin.

  “Just so,” continued Standish. “I’m getting to that now. When this last bit of information came to light we began making some pretty searching inquiries. It was all done on the quiet, naturally: there was nothing criminal to take hold of. And after a while, by piecing together little bits from here and little bits from there, a much more sinister aspect began to emerge; an aspect which bore out the letter written by Johnstone. He had called it treachery at the top; we called it by another name. For, in short, the Key Club had become a criminal organisation, which was all the more dangerous in view of the fact that ninety-nine percent of the members were totally unaware of any change. They were being exploited by a small nucleus of international crooks—crooks who did not stop at murder.

  “At first sight it seemed surprising; at second the only surprising thing about it was that we hadn’t thought of it before. Here was a society capable of getting at times highly confidential information. And this society was insane enough to be inspired by ideals. Why, some of the big men must almost have fainted with horror at the thought of what they were missing! This milch cow already to hand, and nobody doing anything about it. The situation had to be remedied, and it was at the trifling cost of three men’s lives.

  “When exactly the criminal element got in we couldn’t find out, and it was immaterial. Obviously some time after the episode of the French high explosive, and before the Giuseppi affair. How many were actually posing as members of the Key Club we didn’t know—we don’t know now. One man in the inner councils would be enough to pass on information to his pals outside. But what we could do was to throw more light on the Harwich boat murder, or at any rate the reasons for it.

  “The man had been killed by some member of the nucleus who knew what he was carrying in the attaché case. At the time of his death he was undoubtedly on his way to the English Admiralty, from where the same procedure would have been followed as before with the explosive. Johnstone had been thrown from his window because by some means he had found out more than it was advisable for a mere member of the rank and file to know. And Giuseppi had been stabbed—this was only surmise on our part, but it fitted in—he had been stabbed to prevent any possibility of his again passing on the information to some other absurd idealist of the Key Club. In fact the cat had pulled a very plump chestnut out of the fire for the monkey to sell to France.”

  “How long ago was all this?” asked Drummond.

  “About eighteen months. Since then, as far as I know, they have done nothing. Now it looks as if they were on the warpath again.”

  “Any idea what they can be after?”

  “Not an earthly. I chucked the job I was on over a year ago. But I know all the boys who are still at it, and if—which is very unlikely—they are wise to anything, we may be able to help each other mutually.”

  “Why unlikely?” queried Darrell.

  “If they’re still hunting the same line of country, if as they did in the case of Giuseppi they’ve bribed one of our people to give away some secret, we shan’t know anything about it till it’s sold to a foreign Power.”

  “Giuseppi was killed,” said Drummond thoughtfully. “Do you know if anyone who would have been in a position to pass on information of value has gone west? There can’t be a frightful number of ’em.”

  “Not that I know of,” answered Standish. “But that can easily be found out. In fact I’ll do so now.”

  He rose and went to the telephone, to return a few minutes later.

  “Definitely no one,” he said. “The Yard people were a bit curious as to why I asked, but I rode ’em off. I want to be on rather firmer ground before bringing them in.”

  “Do you think the brick bunger is the Giuseppi of the piece?”

  “It’s possible. Though it makes it difficult to follow. They got him back: that you saw with your own eyes. So what more did they want?”

  “The message he threw through the window.”

  “True, old boy. But why, if he’s the Giuseppi this time, should he throw a message through the window? If he was the traitor, already badly wounded, and trying to get away with his life, why bung a cryptic and incomprehensible message into a cottage? Surely on seeing the light his first instinct would have been to come to the occupants for sanctuary.”

  “But that’s what defeats me whoever the bird was,” cried Drummond. “In any event why didn’t he come inside?”

  Standish lit a cigarette thoughtfully.

  “The point has been puzzling me ever since I first heard it from Peter,” he said. “And I can think of only one solution. We must assume that the man was sane: the message, though we can’t understand it at present, was not gibberish. This man, then, by some means which we don’t know escaped from Emil and Co., and was wounded in doing so. He knew they were utterly unscrupulous and would stick at nothing. And so he reasoned as follows: ‘If I go into that cottage and am found there they will think nothing of killing the occupants of the cottage in order to prevent the smallest chance of those occupants passing on the information which they will assume I have told them. And there goes my last hope of getting that information through. I will therefore throw a message in and go on myself in the hope that it will be found by the occupant and not by Emil and his friends.’ Which incidentally is just what happened.”

  Drummond nodded.

  “That’s so. Through a sheer fluke.”

  Standish shrugged his shoulders.

  “One has always got to take a chance,” he remarked. “It came off, and that’s all that matters. And it’s not he who worries me most: it’s the girl. I can’t place her. She tries to dope your tea; she makes every endeavour she can to get hold of the message. O.K. so far. Nothing inconsistent up to date. On the way back she tells you about the Key Club.”

  “Reviling the institution good and hearty,” put in Drummond.

  “That may or may not mean anything: the point is that she brought up the subject. Why? She could have put up her little fairy tale about Harold without mentioning
the Key Club at all. And if she is on their side…”

  He relapsed into silence and the other two stared at him.

  “Surely she must be,” cried Drummond.

  “Something to it, Hugh,” said Darrell. “You know what that bird told us this afternoon: she was drugged as well as Mrs. Eskdale.”

  “It’s this way,” said Standish. “Her actions to start with don’t tally with her later ones. To begin with she seems to be on the side of this man Emil; subsequently she seems against him.”

  “Always provided it was Emil who did the drugging,” put in Drummond.

  And at that moment the hall porter put his head round the corner.

  “One of you gentlemen named Captain Drummond?” he asked.

  “What do you want, porter?” said Drummond.

  “Telephone call from London, sir.”

  “How the devil does anyone know I’m here?” cried Drummond in surprise.

  “May be Denny, Hugh,” said Darrell. “I told him to put a call through in case the old lady came round.”

  Drummond nodded and went off to the box.

  “It’s a puzzler, Peter,” remarked Standish. “Why did that girl go back to the cottage this afternoon?”

  “All Hugh and I could arrive at was that she wanted to verify the wire,” said Darrell.

  “But why? What should have made her suspicious? She must have believed it to be genuine when she got it, or she wouldn’t have acted as she did. What made her change her mind? And stranger still. If she was allowed to receive it in the first instance without anyone bothering, why should there be this feverish excitement over her getting it repeated?”

  “Ask me another. The whole thing has got me guessing. Where does this tall bloke come in? It must have been him who stabbed that wretched devil. Is he one of this criminal bunch at the top that you were talking about? Because unless that man he killed was the world’s best actor I’ll swear he’d never even heard of the Key Club.”

  “It oughtn’t to be difficult to get a line on him,” said Standish. “What was it, Hugh?”

  “Denny right enough,” said Drummond, rejoining them. “Nannie has recovered. It was the telegram the girl went back about. I’ve just been talking to Nannie herself.”

  “How is the old dear?” asked Darrell.

  “She’s all right. Still got the twitters a bit. It seems the girl arrived about five minutes before the men did. Nannie was upstairs changing her dress, and the girl waited in the parlour.”

  “Where presumably she read the wire as you sent it to Mrs. Eskdale,” said Standish.

  “No,” answered Drummond. “I specially asked her that. The old lady had torn it up. All the girl wanted to see was the original message that had come through the window. Which put Nannie, somewhat naturally, in a quandary as she hadn’t any message. And then, before the old lady realised what was happening, the man appeared on the scene, and she remembers nothing more.”

  Standish started to pace up and down with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

  “This beats me,” he said. “Why should the girl have wanted to see the original message? If, which is extremely unlikely, she had discovered it was Coldspur’s tip she would have realised that you had been fooling her, Hugh, from the word ‘go.’ What possible object could there be in that case of her going back to the cottage? If, on the other hand, she still believed the wire to be genuine, why bother to confirm it? You think, Peter, to make sure there was no mistake in it. Perhaps you’re right. But then—why drug her? It doesn’t make sense to me. She was allowed to handle and read the wire in the morning, and she is doped when she tries to see the original in the afternoon. By Jove! chaps, there are some mighty rum points about this show. Is this man Meredith really the girl’s uncle? Where does he stand with regard to Emil? Where do both of ’em stand with regard to Hugh’s tall friend? Are they two separate gangs, and where does the Key Club come in? Is the girl with one and against the other, or is she against them both? If so, what is her game?”

  “There’s another thing, too, that I can’t understand,” said Drummond. “No one is fonder of a thick-ear party than I am, but one doesn’t go about slaughtering people unless there’s a good reason. Why then is that tall swine so matey? Particularly with me. If they think…”

  He broke off abruptly.

  “Hullo! young feller, what do you want? Ronald—this is my friend Mr. Seymour of journalistic fame.”

  The youngster gave a sheepish grin.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “I remembered what you’d said about passing on that information. So after I’d handed in the stuff to the sub-editor I went into a pub in Belmoreton. And I heard Tom the barman talking about Mrs. Eskdale, and saying what a funny thing it was she’d taken to racing. So I pricked up my ears and asked a few questions. And it turned out that the man in the post office, who always has a bit on every day, had been in there at lunch and had remarked on Mrs. Eskdale having sent a wire containing a racing tip. Joe wouldn’t have thought any more about it but for the fact that a stranger in the corner seemed very interested, and asked a lot of questions. The man from the post office got suspicious and shut up, but the stranger went straight away into the telephone box, and put through a long-distance call. At least Joe thought it must have been long-distance owing to the time it took.”

  “What time was this, Seymour?” said Drummond.

  “I suppose about midday, sir, or half-past twelve.”

  “How do you fit that in, Ronald?”

  “What time did the wire arrive at Hartley Court?” asked Standish.

  “Just about midday too,” said Drummond.

  “So that you had left Hartley Court before there was any possibility of this telephone message saying the wire was a fake reaching the other side.”

  He turned to Seymour.

  “Did your friend Tom, the potman, happen to mention any specific question the stranger had put?”

  “Apparently he was very anxious to find out whom the wire had been sent to.”

  “And did the post office man tell him?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, sir. But I know that he did say it was a Morning Leader tip, and that Coldspur was dead out of form just now.”

  Standish rubbed his hands together.

  “Things became a trifle clearer, Hugh,” he said. “They saw at once that the only person who could possibly have inspired the worthy Mrs. Eskdale to send a bogus wire was you yourself. And therefore they realised you had been fooling ’em. Hence the target practice this afternoon. What, however, is not so clear—in fact this information has increased the fog—is their treatment of the girl. It’s difficult enough to see why they should have drugged her when they thought it was all genuine. But why they should do so if they knew it was a fake is beyond me. If what Seymour tells us is correct—and from the activity over there this afternoon I’m sure it is—they must have known there was no message at all at the cottage.”

  “So must the girl,” objected Darrell.

  “I wonder,” said Standish slowly. “I wonder. Supposing she didn’t know anything about it: supposing she believed the wire to be genuine. She goes back to the cottage to make sure, and for some reason or other that action arouses their suspicions. Alternatively, suppose they don’t want her to find out the message is a dud… I know it’s difficult to follow, but when you come across an apparently inexplicable fact, you must be prepared to accept an equally inexplicable solution. If it fits… In short, have we a parallel with the Giuseppi case? Is this girl the counterpart of Johnstone? If so…”

  He paused and his face was grave.

  “You mean she may be in danger,” said Drummond.

  “Exactly. And I don’t like it. Not one little bit. Men who indulge in gun practice on an open road are not likely to entertain many scruples over a mere girl. Look here, Seymour,” he continued, “you’d better get back, and do exactly what Captain Drummond told you. You did excellently in bringing us this information; it’s most valuable.
”

  The youngster’s face flushed with pleasure and Drummond smiled at him.

  “You shall have your scoop, young feller,” he said. “Keep your ears open and your mouth shut. A good boy,” he went on, as the roar of a motor-bicycle announced his departure. “He may prove useful. What’s the next move, sergeant-major? So far as I can see, everything we’ve done up to date has been a waste of time.”

  “Let’s adjourn to the abode of drink,” answered Standish, “where in the intervals of lowering a couple we might hear some local gossip.”

  The three men crossed the lounge and entered the bar, which was deserted.

  “Good evening, bright eyes,” said Drummond. “Will you with your own fair hands decant some sherry?”

  “Dry or sweet?” asked the barmaid.

  “Dry, darling. Tell me, have you ever in the course of your peregrinations round the smiling country-side gone past a house called Hartley Court?”

  “Hartley Court,” cried the girl, “belongs to Doctor Belfage.”

  “I had an idea that a man called Meredith was living there at present,” said Drummond.

  “Very likely. The doctor often lets it to the racing set. Two and six, please! At least, I suppose he didn’t ought to be called a doctor no more.”

  “Dear, dear,” cried Drummond. “Has he blotted his copy-book?”

  “Not half he hasn’t. Got struck off the register about a year ago. Fair scandal there was, I can tell you.”

  “How very reprehensible,” remarked Drummond,

  “Nasty little man he was, too,” continued the girl. “I wouldn’t have had him near me: him and his beastly animals. Had a sort of zoo, he did. Taken ’em with him to his other house.”

  “And where might that be?” asked Drummond idly.

  “Good gracious me,” muttered the girl. “Talk of the devil…”

  A short, stout man had entered the bar. His face was round and puffy; his appearance oily and smug.